In paranormal/cryptozoological news from around the Pacific Northwest recently, there’s been a lot going on, including the resurgence of Montana’s Flathead Lake Monster, the coming to an area near Boise of the television show “Finding Bigfoot,” plus a local Sandpoint group formed to help investigate paranormal occurrences.

The Lake County Leader, a newspaper out of Polson, Mont., reported the sighting of an aquatic animal some 25 feet in length with a whale-like tail. The May 18, 2012 edition of the paper had a front page article detailing the sighting by Pam Moriarty, her daughter Laura and friend Justin Lagemann, who all observed the beast swimming against the current of Flathead Lake for a full five minutes just 50 yards offshore. Montana’s Flathead Lake Monster has a long, if spotty, history, with the last known sighting nearly a year ago prior to last month’s Finley Point observation. Simply Googling Flathead lake Monster should get you a few sites for more information. You can read the Leader story here: http://tinyurl.com/79acf27

The Animal Planet’s television reality show “Finding Bigfoot” is now in Pocatello filming an episode based on a video shot by high school students who saw a large, hairy, man-shape watching them from a crest line before lumbering off into the woods. The students went to the area later and found numerous large footprints which they also photographed. To see the original video footage before the Animal Planet edits or enhances it, you can go to localnews8.com. No word on when the Idaho Finding Bigfoot episode will air, but my own unofficial estimate of their prep to air time is about two months so it shouldn’t be too far away.

Sandpoint’s Bonner County Daily Bee ran a front page story (http://tinyurl.com/8xaysfw) on June 20, 2012 about some potential Sasquatch prints found along the nearby Trestle Creek drainage by resident Bonnie Thompson. She made plaster casts of two of them but didn’t report finding them ‘til some 30 years had passed. The Bee’s website has a photo of one of the plaster casts.

And on the Web: The website strangeusa.com has a collection of a dozen or so Sandpoint area UFO reports, plus a new (to me) paranormal research group has begun locally to look into “strange northwest anomalies” called the Sandpoint Idaho Paranormal Society (look for them on Facebook). Another spook-based research group, which recently investigated hauntings of Sandpoint’s Panida Theater is Inland Northwest Paranormal Research (also on Facebook). Finally, while living scarcely a football field away from Clark Fork and the home of the Wampus Cats, I was pleasantly surprised to find them mentioned in one of my favorite websites, cryptomundo.com, which discusses the history and lore of these fabled mythological (?) creatures. You can read the story here: http://tinyurl.com/7kcywyl

Finally, a quick mention of a truly unknown local phenomena, that of western Oregon and Washington’s bizarre geological anomalies, the Mima Mounds, those million or so unexplained round mounds for which no satisfactory explanations have ever been put forward. William Corliss’s “Unknown Earth, A Handbook of Geological Anomalies” puts forth some 30 different possible proposed solutions, none of which fit the facts. For instance, built by gophers? Fine, but there are no gophers in the Mima Valley! The list goes on. (Check out this great story from the Seattle Times on the mounds: http://tinyurl.com/5avleh)

‘til next time, keep spreading the word, Soylent Green is People! All Homage to Xena!

Jody Forest will be tracking Bigfoot in the Selkirk Mountains in early July. You can reach him at joe(at)riverjournal.com when he returns.